Saving life.(Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from Successes in Developing Countries)(Book Review)

Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from Successes in Developing Countries, by Edward C. Green (Praeger, 392 pp., $39.95)

LAST June, the official in charge of UNICEF's eastern and southern African operations declared that, in the name of AIDS prevention, condoms should be made available "for everybody, everywhere and at all times." "Let us stop the almost metaphysical debate on the pros and cons of the use of condoms," he continued, because "the use of condoms ... has been a part of all known successes to reduce HIV infections." Such is the philosophy of the international AIDSprevention establishment: Only condoms can save the world from AIDS, so international funds should ensure that the people of the developing world are ever more securely swathed in latex.

There are, however, no condom "successes" in Africa. Something like 700 million condoms are shipped to the continent, year in and year out, courtesy of the U.N., the U.S., and the EU, yet infection rates remain stubbornly high. The UNICEF official approvingly cites Botswana's commitment to condoms--"Let us follow the decision of the government of Botswana"--but about 35 percent of that country's population is infected. That's the example the rest of the world should follow?

Whenever someone, usually an obscure African churchman, dares to raise such uncomfortable questions, the full might of the AIDS establishment comes down to smite him, and he is condemned as a religious zealot. Finally, though, there is a challenger to condom dominance who cannot be so easily dismissed. He is a distinguished public-health official, a paragon, in fact, of establishment credentials: Edward C. Green, senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Green has had an epiphany of common sense and now has the courage to criticize the role of his colleagues as prophylactic missionaries to the Third World. In his important new book, Rethinking AIDS Prevention, he exposes the failure of the condom approach, and explains why AIDS experts cling to this failure.

What happened is that Green's colleagues inherited the ideology of the homosexual revolution of the 1980s. Green matter-of-factly states that "gay Westerners" tend to be "sexually hedonistic," that "some in the gay community believe in an 'anything goes' sexual expression that takes as a given that sexuality should be expressed and enjoyed to the utmost, and there be little or no worry about consequences." AIDS prevention was developed for gays, and in many cases by gays; thus, anything that challenged the sexual hedonism of homosexual identity would be out of bounds.

Green quotes at length from one American AIDS expert's web-posted paean to promiscuity: "Unlike gibbons and some other mammals, humans are not naturally monogamous. Some major religions make polypartnering (having sex with several partners) a sin in order to promote monogamy. However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with polypartnering. Indeed, polypartnering allows participants to enjoy a greater variety of sexual behaviors, with a greater number of persons, to enhance their lovemaking skills." Monogamy, on the other hand, is as dreadful as if "religions were to dictate that it was morally wrong for people to eat out at different ...